Complicated and successful negotia- tions are difficult to dramatize. Most of the other significant features of Roo- sevelt's Presidency present the same prob- lem. Roosevelt initiated antitrust litiga- tion against the railroads, nudged the Republican Party away from its single- minded preoccupation with tariff pro- tection, worked with J. P Morgan to stave off a financial collapse in 1907, and pushed for Cuban trade reciprocity. He established many national parks, forests, and monuments, strengthened the In- terstate Commerce Commission, cre- ated the Department of Commerce and Labor, regulated railroad freight rates, acquired a lot of new ships for the Navy, and took on the race issue in a minor way by having BookerT: Washington to din- ner at the White House and by appoint- ing a handful of blacks to federal office in the South. It was part of Roosevelt's achievement, in these cases, that the op- position to him was civil, largely taking the form of speeches and written at- tacks, when it might just as easily have been violent, especially given the charac- ter of American life at the time. Because of Morris's experience with Reagan, in which he had greater access to a working White House than any writer has ever had, he knows the extent to which the Presidency is an adminis- trative job, involving many minor ap- pointments, technical matters, routine events and statements, intense battles with people who will soon be forgotten, and the handling of pressing problems that turn out to be temporary: We are in the middle of a boom in popular Presi- dential biography, with Richard Reeves, David McCullough, Michael Beschloss, Robert Caro, and others all hard at work alongside Morris, and that may make the job look easier than it is. To succeed, a biographer usually has to limit himself care:fiùly to a few dramatic moments, or mine a seam of pure archival gold, or prune details while force:fiùlyexplaining why everything matters. Two other Roosevelt books are com- ing out now, a very short biography by Louis Auchincloss and a one-volume selection of his letters, edited by H. W. Brands, a professor of history at Texas A. & M. All three books bring to mind Richard Hofstadter's observation, half a century ago, that the Progressives were a displaced élite trying to regain through government "reform" the power that had been taken from them by the rise of in- dustrial capitalism. T.R. was born, in 1858, into one of the richest families in New York, but by the time he became President the Roosevelts were only or- dinarily rich. Shorthand terms for the people who had passed them financially, h " N "" th T:" H suc as ewport or e rour un- dred," are always used pejoratively in TR.'s correspondence. He liked to think of himself as standing at the head of a great army of decent, self-reliant mer- chants, artisans, farmers, and business proprietors who could protect the coun- try from the exploitative trusts, on the one hand, and the proto-revolutionary immigrant masses, on the other, but who needed the right governmental instru- ments with which to do so. Morris is not one to take a synthetic or an analytic approach to a subject; he always zooms in for the closeup. Nearly all historians, whether academic or pop- ular, write from a position outside their primary sources, drawing on them in a voice of authorial mastef)T. Morris writes from inside, presenting everything in scenario fashion, with characters and ac- tion and dialogue, in energetic prose, and with little overt authorial presence. He takes us through the Roosevelt Presidency practically month by month, relentlessly trying to make a bureaucratic history ån- ematic. He intercuts, "Godfather" style, between separate but simultaneous dra- mas; gets inside people's heads when he doesn't quite have the right; and, à la Dickens, conveys people's inner lives by describing their physical peculiarities, so that William Howard Taft's corpulence proves that he is complacent. Seldom is there a passage of simple, straight- forward prose. Morris is the hardest- working man in the history business. "Theodore Rex" begins with a gran- diose set piece-a prologue in which Roosevelt takes a train trip to Wash- ington and glimpses, from his window, something that symbolizes every major aspect of American life-and the book gradually settles into a style that's just a little less frantic about holding our interest. Still, Morris's obsessive reader- friendliness often has the opposite of the intended effect-it stops you, or, at least, sends you back to the endnotes, because you wonder how he can possibly know exactly what long-dead characters were The Most T echnolo cally Advanced-Chair in History The Freedom chair does the thinking for you. With automatic adjustments, all you have to do is sit. Dramatically improve your workday! , j I , ... I" . ''''' ' ..." ,.. ... ii' .:, FREEDOM CHAIR - é tI'. ," -- ..' . , www.ny.sit4Iess.com 1-877 -628- LESS We Will Not Be Undersold! . . . ..' . . . . .. . ... '.' . ...... . '. .. .' "h,;h'.'h"': "', ' Rf ff& } lfX: ', h, ',..' '" '.'.. .' . Q Ji.f :ß:': I:Q M[:J ßrh ' h h" , .....'..... ;.';'þrt ;' r .'#m !' y::P.:i:t"d:' "'.' '.'.""h' .' ....." .... ,..,h; ... __ . .. n .. . ........ .. . .. ............. . ... í '1.80 t :t 5, r .c ff Flli; .:: 'F ! 7 i4>: ..._" '. VISA: ::.;'," .;,)....... ,,,d&";,,' .. k.:);'c ,.""") 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